Indiana University students and faculty hard at work on Best of News Design book

By Mary S. Kenney, Indiana University School of Journalism Web Reporter, June 6, 2013. Posted with permission of the Indiana University School of Journalism

Papers and books crowd Indiana University lecturer Steve Layton’s desk. Next to where he sits is last year’s Society for News Design hardcover, Best of News Design. Under it is the 2011 book, and under that are the printed pages that will become the 2013 edition.

It’s the 34th year of existence for the SND news design awards book, but it’s IU’s first year to design it.

For several months, Layton has led a team of students collecting entries and designing the annual book highlighting SND award winners. Layton said they will finish it by early November for the annual SND conference in Louisville, Ky.

Alumni and the Indiana Daily Student have created an impressive history of design for the School of Journalism, Layton said. SND chose IU based on that reputation.

“(SND) is the most significant organization that does this sort of thing,” Layton said.

The work began in early February when Layton, Matt Callahan, BAJ’13, and Aliya Mood, BAJ’13, traveled to Syracuse, N.Y., for three days to witness the judging for the Best of News Design contest.

The trip was far from smooth. They were delayed one day by Winter Storm Nemo and finally reached Syracuse by flying into Ithaca, N.Y., then driving an hour and a half to the contest.

Once they arrived, the three were given entries as the judges ranked them, and they chose how to display them in the book. Callahan said some of the entries were 50 or more pages long.

“It was daunting,” he said in an email interview. “Essentially, it was 30 hours of cutting pages apart with Exact-o knifes over three days and making split second decisions on what individual page best represented a body of work.”

Mood, now a designer at the Phoenix Gannett design studio, said they were able to see all the entries, a fantastic learning opportunity for a designer.

“It was definitely exhausting,” she said with a laugh during a phone interview, adding that they were on their feet for up to 12 hours.

Callahan, who is currently interning at The New York Times and will spend this fall at the Virginian-Pilot, said he wouldn’t trade the experience for anything.

“I learned so much from watching the judgment process and seeing the thousands and thousands of entries that didn’t win,” Callahan said. “I got a new appreciation of what an award of excellence means.”

“Not to mention,” he added, “that Aliya and I got to karaoke with three other IU alumni at an after party – ‘Mary Jane’s Last Dance’ by Tom Petty.”

Layton said there were 727 winners in the print division, which they viewed and edited in Syracuse. They later collected about 180 more winners from the digital division.

Despite this being IU’s first year to design the book, IU already has a strong tie to it. Ron Johnson, director of IU Student Media, designed the books cataloguing the 2001-07 contests. He came to IU in 2008, while he was designing his last edition.

Johnson said SND has a long-standing tradition of including every winning design in the book, including those who placed lower than first. He said it’s one of the best learning tools for designers.

“This book is literally just a treasure trove of page design ideas,” Johnson said. “You look around any newsroom, including the IDS, and you’ll see them everywhere and dog-eared.”

The book is now nearly finished and is going through final proofs, Layton said.

Originally he had nine students working on it, but he said Callahan and senior Missy Wilson have shouldered the majority of design work. He said others have left for internships or become busy with schoolwork.

Wilson, who is spending this summer at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, said she and the other designers had to use restraint and simplicity to make sure the content would stand out.

“We don’t want people to notice our design, but rather the winning pages,” Wilson said in an email interview.

Though IU students designed the book’s content, Osama Aljawish, a senior designer from Syria, designed the cover. Of five finalists, Aljawish’s design received a majority of 48 percent of votes from SND members.

Mood said having a personal connection to the hardcover will make it even more special when she receives her copy in the fall.

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2 comments

* If a writer/reporter/text editor had a grammar or style book, say Strunk & White or Warriner’s, and said writer/reporter/text editor spent large portions of multiple shifts leafing through it, how many shifts would it take before said writer/reporter/text editor would be told to use one’s own time for that? More than two? I always ponder this question when I hear the tales of these SND editions.

* Not to trash this effort (too hard), but don’t we always hear about how design is not about these PFADs, but instead it’s about attracting readers to the stories? Isn’t this effort sort of, you know, not about that at all? I mean, I once held and opened a couple of these manuals, and unless things have changed, you’re basically looking at many samples the size of a dollar bill, if that. So aren’t you really encouraging people to do what they say they don’t — which is concentrating far more on the overall composition of the page than on any of the elements? I guess I’m not sure how tiny replicas of some pages have much to do with the stated goal of designing to be journalists, rather than artistes.

* Given that a lot of design is in central studios now, and that we’re on about Year 25 of “Design Really Does Attract Readers — This Time the Numbers Will Align with Our Claim!”, isn’t continuing to judge success/failure in this fashion sort of like soldiers isolated on some Pacific island and continuing to fight a war long since over? Fewer and fewer readers get their news from print, so it seems that obsessing about the appearance of the cover of the print edition is like waiting for the fetal pig to be cut up and thrown out, then digging up said pig and putting lipstick on it.

Seriously, these stories are always entertaining for people who were never in newspapers. “They really think we look for THAT?” In about a decade or so, the decline and fall of the newspaper industry is going to be in textbooks (or their equivalent) as an example of what not to do. Most industries simply become obsolete. Newspaper managers have mixed the poison, consumed it repeatedly, and then kept offering it to anyone who came through the door.